Summary
Boston Blue has a tighter focus in “Anatomy of a Bomb”, which leads to one of the more effectively tense outings of the season. Fancy that.
The big problem with Boston Blue, which I’ve been moaning about every week and which several regular commenters have also rightly mentioned, is that it tries to do too much at once. In that, at least, I feel very vindicated by Episode 16, which keeps its focus nice and tight and becomes one of the most effectively engaging outings of the season. See how that works?
I’ll grant you that “Anatomy of a Bomb” is built around an extremely familiar concept. A desperate father – an ex-soldier, naturally – takes a hospital hostage in an effort to save the life of his sick daughter, who needs a liver transplant and has been shafted by corruption in the hospital administration. It’s a bit “yawn” in that respect, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t pretty well handled.
Jefferson White, aka Yellowstone Jimmy, who has also shown up recently in The Hunting Party as influencer-hating serial killer Lou Kaplan, plays Greg, the hostage-taker, with a measure of sympathy and desperation that he’s really good at. There’s a chance that his plight resonated with me a bit more than it might have done, given I’ve spent a lot of time in a hospital recently, in which nothing has been done in a respectable timeframe, plus I’m a father of two girls, but that’s the emotional angle on which these kinds of stories work. It’s why we see so many of them.
Boston Blue goes a bit further than usual in Episode 16 to humanize Greg, and now that I think about it, I’m not sure he gets any kind of comeuppance at all, though he does eventually disarm the bomb when his daughter, Sofie, gets the treatment she needs (and should have been given in the first place). In its reluctance to vilify Greg, “Anatomy of a Bomb” does feel like it’s lacking a bad guy, but the American healthcare system kind of occupies that role, specifically rendered in the form of a corrupt, self-serving administrator.
Figuring out who killed the hospital worker who was responsible for Sofie’s transplant helps to split the difference and get the action out of the hospital, as well as giving Sean and Jonah, and Lena’s boyfriend, whose name I’ve forgotten, something to do. But this isn’t as much of a downside as these parallel strands usually are because everyone’s working to the same objective, bound by the same ticking clock. Anyone who might have pulled too much focus elsewhere, like Mae, who at least gets a namecheck, and Edwin, who is still having some complications from his heart condition, is just kept out of the episode entirely, which is a way smarter choice.
The downside is that the murder mystery arguably absolves Greg to an unrealistic degree, and I don’t think the writing does a good enough job of tying the whole thing up so there are meaningful – though not outsized – consequences to his actions. But the writing is surprisingly good when it homes in on Greg and Danny’s shared status as both veterans and parents, which also helps to add some layers to Danny and his relationship with Sean. There’s also a bit of a cop-out when the idea is floated that Sofie is taking a liver that another little girl also needs – there’s an objective medical justification for why Sofie needs it more urgently, which kills the moral dilemma.
The wildcard of Boston Blue Episode 16 is the presence of Troy, Lena’s ex, who cheated on her in medical school. He’s one of the doctors working at the hospital, and takes on a fairly substantial role in the hostage situation. He’s played by Tosin Morohunfola, aka the male lead in Tyler Perry’s woeful Prime Video rom-com Finding Joy, and his job is to be all handsome and apologetic to create some romantic tension around Lena. It doesn’t really take, since it mostly just reminds Lena that she’s happy how she is and should forgive Troy and herself for his transgressions and the breakdown of that relationship, but I think, on balance, “Anatomy of a Bomb” benefits from Troy’s presence.
